When the books arrived, and what they were. 872 of 1,257 books carry a known acquisition date, 1998–2026 — enough to watch the collection’s shape and composition shift across 28 years of collecting.
872
dated books
465
still unread
407
read
86
peak year
The mix — what share
The collection squeezed to full height, so each band shows its share rather than its size — how the composition shifted. Business and fiction owned the early years; the mix fractures and diversifies as everything else grows. Press play, or hover any year.
2026 · 872 books
Other 9% Business 20% Self-Help 6% Design 5% Reference 3% Spirituality 3% Biography 4% History 4% Politics 2% Fiction 14% Psychology 6% Philosophy 5% Economics 5% Science 10% Technology 3%
Press play, or hover a year for the shares. Full height at every year, so each band is its percentage of the collection so far.
What we learnFiction was the early appetite — ~28% of the shelf by 2008 — and has fallen to ~14%. It didn’t shrink: 33 → 122 books. Everything else simply outgrew it. Falling share, rising volume.
What has changedScience climbed the other way, roughly 4% → 10% — the library tilting toward evidence. Business stayed the anchor near 20%, dipping mid-decade then recovering.
What's missingNormalizing to full height erases scale — the early left edge is only one or two books, so trust the drift, not the wobble. And the thin domains never break out of the pack; watch the fat currents, not the slivers.
Coverage — which eras I own
Rows are the era a book was written (newest on top); the axis is when it was acquired. One dot per book — dense clusters darken, and the medieval-to-Enlightenment rows hold just a dot or two the whole way across. The most distinctive of the three: it surfaces the thousand-year hole, and we don’t hide it. Press play to watch it build.
2026 · 865 books
acquired → · written ↓ · one dot per book
One dot per book — 865 carry both a written and an acquired date. The near-empty bands are real, not missing data: the whole medieval-to-Enlightenment stretch (1000–1700) holds just four books. Row heights track the years each era covers — the hole is as tall as it is long.
What we learnA barbell in time. 69% of dated books (595 of 865) were written after 2000, a thin antiquity tail (13 written before 500 CE — the Stoics, the Analects, the Gita), and an almost-empty middle. The collection owns the very old and the very new.
What has changedRecent eras filled in fastest during the buying surge — the densest clusters sit bottom-right: books written 2015–19, bought 2019–22. Both clocks lean late; newer books dominate partly because the buying itself is recent.
What's missingThe hole is literal — just 4 books written between 1000 and 1700, 4 across the whole 500–1700 span. Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne, Hume, Smith, Gibbon — essentially absent. That gap is the reading list.
The river — what grew
The same shift as the mix, but in raw counts: each domain is a current whose width is its running total of books acquired. A trickle through the 2000s, then a steep widening after 2014. Press play, or hover any current.
2026 · 872 books
Other 80 Business 172 Self-Help 54 Design 43 Reference 22 Spirituality 28 Biography 38 History 36 Politics 20 Fiction 122 Psychology 52 Philosophy 47 Economics 47 Science 86 Technology 25
Press play, or hover a year for the running totals. Each current’s width is the books acquired in that domain, cumulative.
What we learnTwo currents dwarf the rest — Business (172) and Fiction (122), then Science (86). Business and fiction are the shelf’s twin centres of gravity: the practical and the narrative, side by side.
What has changedFlat until ~2014, then a wall of water. 614 of 872 dated books (70%) arrived after 2014, and 218 came in 2020–22 alone. The pace changed, not the taste.
What's missingThe surge widened many currents at once, so it added range, not just volume. The 309 books with no purchase date — older, and disproportionately already read — never enter the river, and the long tail of small subjects sits bundled in Other.
What the three views show
Read together, the mix, the coverage, and the river say three things at once. All computed live from the 872 books with a known purchase date.
The library is youngNearly three-quarters of it — 614 of 872 dated books — arrived after 2014. This is not a collection that accumulated steadily over 28 years. It accelerated, and 218 books came in 2020–22 alone.
Fiction was surroundedFiction led the early shelf at ~28% and is now ~14% — not because the buying stopped (33 → 122 books), but because everything else outgrew it faster. The library diversified around a narrative core it never abandoned.
The shape is a barbellDense from 1950 to now, a thin tail of antiquity, and an almost-empty middle: just 4 books written between 1000 and 1700. The collection owns the ancient and the modern and skips the thousand years between.
Only books with a recorded acquisition date appear here — 309 owned books have none (mostly older titles bought before purchase tracking). So the earliest years read as sparser than the library truly was.